Friday, 1 August 2008

DigiCert Gets our vote for wildcard SSL certificates

In our search for a wild card SSL certificate (previous blog post), we looked into a large number of SSL providers.

While all providers will provide us with a *.mydomain.com wildcard SSL certificate, only DigiCert gives us the option to tag the certificate with Subject Alternative Names.

What does that mean? That means that we can setup our certificate to look somewhat like this:


  • *.mydomain.com
    • mail.mydomain.com
    • rww.mydomain.com
    • oma.mydomain.com
    • mydomain.com
In the case of Windows Mobile 5 devices, having the actual URL of the HTTPS site OMA will use to access Exchange listed in the SSL certificate guarantees that there will be no compatibility issues.

For those of our clients that have multiple SBS sites, or an SBS site with multiple branch offices, the wildcard SSL certificate will make things like Remote Web Workplace and other SSL secured Internet facing services simpler to access and manage.

Their price includes as many sites and servers needed. There is no price augmentation for additional sites, servers, or reissued certificate requests. The price is the price is the price! ;)

When we placed our order for a wildcard certificate, we heard back from DigiCert by phone within a couple of hours. Some questions needed to be answered to confirm our company's identity before the certificate release would happen.

Finally, their Web management interface is very straight forward to operate when requesting or managing our certificates.

For us SBSers, DigiCert is definitely a company to look at for your wildcard SSL needs.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

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